Claudia De Rham

Claudia de Rham (born 29 March 1978) is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology, and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity and won the award in 2020.

Early life and education De Rham was born in Lausanne. She completed her undergraduate studies in France, receiving a Diplôme d'Ingénieur in physics at the École Polytechnique in Paris in 2000. She received a master's degree in physics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2001. She has trained as a pilot and made it through several stages of the European Space Agency's astronaut selection process. She moved to McMaster University in Hamilton and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, in 2006, where she worked in a joint postdoctoral position in cosmology. In 2010, she joined the University of Geneva as an assistant professor. She moved to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2011 and became an associate professor there in 2016. She joined Imperial College London in 2016. That year, she was awarded a £100,000 Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society.

Her research is in the area of theoretical cosmology, and she explores gravitational models that could explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. De Rham is recognised as a researcher at the forefront of the development of theories of massive gravity, where the particle carrier of the gravitational force, the graviton, may be massive. In 2010, she constructed a nonlinear theory of a massive graviton, which is theoretically consistent and ghost-free. That formulation of massive gravity is now known as "de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) theory", owing to its discovery by de Rham, Gregory Gabadadze, and Andrew J. Tolley.

De Rham was interviewed by Morgan Freeman in season 8 of Through the Wormhole.

Publications In November 2023, de Rham co-authored The Encyclopedia of Cosmology, Set 2: Frontiers in Cosmology, Volume 1: Modified Gravity, with Andrew J Tolley, also of Imperial College London. In April 2024, she published The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity.

Awards and leadership roles 2010–2014: PI on Swiss National Foundation Professorship Grant, for the project "Challenging the cosmological paradigm" 2016–2021: Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award 2017–2022: PI on ERC consolidator grant, for the project "Massive Gravity and Cosmology" 2018: St John's College, Cambridge Adams Prize 2018: Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists: finalist, UK Physical Sciences and Engineering 2020: Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists: winner, UK Physical Sciences and Engineering 2023: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences